


from the heart in exile

by strikinglight



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Epistolary, Gen, Minor Dorothea Arnault/Edelgard von Hresvelg, Minor Ferdinand von Aegir/Hubert von Vestra, POV Second Person, Post-Black Eagles Route (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Post-Canon, Retirement, Seasonal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:15:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23475280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: You can’t speak just yet to whether time—and age? experience? not that war or rulership have given you much of the latter, at least in the area of gardening—has made your thumbs any less brown, but the house in the Oghma Mountains is surrounded by so many growing things it hardly seems to matter. It sits at the edge of a forest, on the gentle lower slopes, and the people in the nearest town had all smiled to speak of it when they pointed the way for Hubert, the day you arrived. A number of them were old enough to remember what it had been like, years ago, in the warm and golden before, and to insist that it had not changed in the ways that mattered. It was still full of light. The air still smelled green.In which Edelgard keeps a garden, Hubert learns to fly, and those they leave behind refuse to be left behind.
Relationships: Black Eagles Students & Edelgard von Hresvelg, Edelgard von Hresvelg & Hubert von Vestra, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 35
Kudos: 88





	from the heart in exile

**Author's Note:**

  * For [katsugenki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/katsugenki/gifts).



> This is for Genki, who asked for Edelgard and Hubert's Early Retirement Plan and got a big bubbling soup pot of Black Eagles feelings. At many points they could have stopped me, but they didn't, and I am so glad.
> 
> This fic takes place about five years post-Crimson Flower, following the premise of Edelgard's solo ending: that she abdicates and retreats from the public eye when she considers her life's work complete.
> 
> [Title and epigraph](https://readalittlepoetry.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/the-word-by-tony-hoagland/).

_among your duties, pleasure  
is a thing_

_that also needs accomplishing.  
  
_

_— Tony Hoagland, “The Word”_

* * *

**spring**

> Ninth Day of the Great Tree Moon, year 1191
> 
> Dear Edelgard,
> 
> Spring has begun to unveil her face in Enbarr at last in the sennight since your departure. As I write this, the sun is shining through the open window of my study, and I hear the sparrows returning. The crocuses in the rear gardens are already beginning to bud. No doubt you already suspect all this talk of the weather is to divert your attention from politics, and in particular from yesterday’s parliament meeting. I sympathize with your continuing desire to be informed of affairs of state, but must also remind you I am under strict orders to give you no tidings of those whatsoever, under any circumstances. Let it not be said that I, Ferdinand von Aegir, ever caused so much as a ripple in your commitment to relaxation.
> 
> Is the house to your liking? I have faith that my caretaker Alfred will not have let the vagaries of time and war send it to weed. I had written to him a moon ago to tell him to air the rooms for you, and of your interest in gardening; I hope you are prepared to learn more about flowers than we ever did at school, and many things about how the turning of the seasons might be observed from the earth besides. I must visit you before too long, to see what you and Hubert will have made of all of it—of that quiet little tract of land in the shadow of the pine forests that I loved, where I spent so many happy summers. In the meantime, anything you have to tell me in writing of your doings there would gladden my heart a hundredfold.
> 
> Speaking of the man, I will thank you to give my regards to Hubert, if you find he has a whit of attention to spare for them. If he does not—that is to say, if you find him as wed to his duties as he has ever been, in whatever shape and form they have taken in this new life of yours, I will thank you to give them to him even so, that neither of you might forget me.
> 
> Dorothea, with whom I had the pleasure of dining the other night after the opera, prevails upon me to beg you to write to her. She says this is a jest only, but make no mistake, I see it for what it is. Look at all of us here, eaten up with terror at being forgotten! What a silly, peculiar, utterly human thing.
> 
> Be well! Do not hesitate to send to Alfred in town for anything you may require, or to Enbarr, should you ever have need of me. Rest assured that the crossing of mountains is nothing between friends, and that I remain, faithfully,
> 
> Your obedient servant,  
> Ferdinand von Aegir

Close to a fortnight now in the house in the mountains, and you find you are still unpacking. Down near the bottom of the last trunk, there’s a scrap of paper, and on it the words _roses:_ _sunlight, at least six hours daily._

When you opened it that morning, the trunk had been stuffed full of books and scrolls and sheaves of paper, notes from as far back as your school days. This is one of Dorothea’s; it’s obvious from the way the words lean to the right, each looping letter reaching out for the next like laughing, like dancing. You had memorized their meaning but had never been fully able to put it into practice, for all the extra hours you’d both spent in the greenhouse after gardening class, arguing about plants. About how some things needed to be pruned before they could grow. _Gently, Edie, gently! Why, you’ve got the brownest thumb of anyone I’ve ever known._

You can’t speak just yet to whether time—and age? experience? not that war or rulership have given you much of the latter, at least in the area of gardening—has made your thumbs any less brown, but the house in the Oghma Mountains is surrounded by so many growing things it hardly seems to matter. It sits at the edge of a forest, on the gentle lower slopes, and the people in the nearest town had all smiled to speak of it when they pointed the way for Hubert, the day you arrived. A number of them were old enough to remember what it had been like, years ago, in the warm and golden _before,_ and to insist that it had not changed in the ways that mattered. It was still full of light. The air still smelled green.

_It’s a wonderful house, milady. Peaceful. We know it well. And we remember him, too, the young master with the bright hair. Young Ferdinand, now a Prime Minister. Imagine that._

The window is open in your room, and the sunshine that is so beloved of Ferdinand and of Dorothea’s roses is spilling now all over your floor. So warm, so buttery you might sink your hands into it and watch your arms disappear to the elbows. You remember the caretaker. Alfred. The old man with kind eyes, hitching his old bay mare to a wagon in the courtyard, preparing to return to his family in town. _The young master said you were to have the east-facing room, milady. Insisted upon it, milady. For the light, you see._ _And for Master Hubert, the west-facing room, for the quiet._

He had assured you the house would as good as keep itself. You find you can believe it, now, unpacking your trunk full of words. Down the hall, you can hear Hubert bustling about, testing the floorboards underfoot, stacking his own books in the empty shelves. Quiet, indeed, but not so soft it doesn’t echo. Not so silent you might ever forget he is there.

* * *

**summer**

> Day 15 / Blue Sea Moon / 1191
> 
> Hey, Edelgard!
> 
> Ferdinand says every good letter starts with talking about the weather, but what’s the point in that? Are you so far away the weather’s different where you are? Is it, like, a whole other season? But now he’s getting on my case about all the ink I’ve wasted telling you about how pointless I think talking about the weather is, so… may as well: it’s been raining, and I kind of hate it. You know how I hate it. It’s only when Linhardt tells me the clouds are blowing down from the north, from the mountains—from where you are, so they should’ve passed over you first before they get to us here—that I hate it a little less.
> 
> That’s gotten Ferdinand off my case. We argue about everything the same as always, except more, ‘cause there’s more to argue about. Everything from the weather to the Almyran trade routes. Parliament’s got to be sick of us by now. I like it, though! It keeps me on my toes. Not that the Minister of Military Affairs needs to be on his toes much in peacetime—they’ve started joking about putting me in charge of supervising the farms instead, can you believe? Like I didn’t have a browner thumb than you back in the day. But then it seems like that’s changing for you, so maybe it’ll change for me too, and plants will start liking me enough not to die when I touch them, maybe.
> 
> Did you ever imagine things would end up like this? I know you think of everything, but did you really? I sure wouldn’t have, ever, even if you told me.
> 
> One good thing about the rain, I guess: the flowers in your garden must be happy? They’ll really liven up the place, when it’s time for them to bloom! If they get a smile out of Hubert, you’ve got to tell me, right away.
> 
> Caspar

Caspar’s letter arrives creased and damp with rainwater, in the eager hand of a shepherd boy who grins from ear to ear as he passes it to you on his way up into the hills. When the sun returns, you unfold it onto your windowsill to dry; the ink, as if by magic, is mercifully unspoiled, but for a gentle blurring around the edges of your name.

All the days are this way, in this exceptionally temperamental summer, gloomy and brilliant by turns. Alfred had told you it would be too wet for roses, so back in the spring you had planted hydrangeas instead. They are flowering now in the front garden, awake after the rain.

You are weeding the flowerbeds, working slowly, when you see Hubert come out from around the back of the house. He moves like a shadow, even here, but what takes you by surprise is realizing that for once you hear him before you see him. The sounds are small—a twig snapping, the whisper of fallen leaves, all easy to mistake for the voice of the forest had you not learned long ago how to listen for Hubert, particularly. You can only conclude he’s begun to walk with a heavier step, that he’s begun to take his time. How strange to imagine.

He lifts a hand to wave as he crosses over to you. You are raising yours in answer before you realize that neither of you have been in the habit of doing that, before now. His hair is tousled, his face windburnt from so many hours walking alone up in the high places.

You wonder if you look as alien to him as he does to you in this moment, on your knees in the grass with your hair tied back under a headscarf, dirt across your knuckles and under your nails.

"The pegasi live above us," he tells you, when he draws near. His voice is the same as ever, cool and bone-dry, stating facts. If he feels anything about those facts, he has made it a point to hide them from you, more out of habit than anything else. "A whole herd of them, far up in the mountains where the river runs."

Pegasi are not strange to either of you. They were instruments of death during your war, like so many other things. You had even learned how to ride them at the monastery, in an older and steadier time, if only long enough to complete an assignment, pass a test. But the notion of seeing them here, in the wild, is different. Everything about being here is different.

You feel yourself smile—small, hesitating. You hear yourself say, "Is that so," and reach down, and pull another weed out of the earth.

* * *

**autumn**

> Day 17 of the Wyvern Moon, year 1191
> 
> Dear Edelgard,
> 
> It’s true indeed that pegasi are extremely finicky creatures, particularly when it comes to the humans they will permit to ride them. The common assumption that they will allow themselves to be tamed and ridden by only the most pure-hearted maidens, however, has been disproven by more recent research, and the nonexistence of male pegasus riders in Fódlan appears to be rooted far more in the prevalence of this folk belief than in any actual scientific study. The truth is the meticulousness of pegasi is in fact an intense and acute sensitivity to their riders’ thoughts and emotions, and generally they will not permit a human being to handle them whose heart is filled with discord or hatred. Gender, however, seems a negligible factor in this equation, if it is a factor at all.
> 
> The peaks of the Oghma Mountains have long been a favored breeding site for wild pegasus herds; I’ve heard tell of their nesting grounds stretching from north to south, all along the mountain range. As the season turns, you should see them beginning to migrate—they fly southeast across the sea to Morphis, where they remain overwinter, and return with the spring thaws, though how exactly they find their flyways is not fully understood. It is said that they orientate by the sun by day, and by the stars at night, and can navigate with pinpoint accuracy even over the sea. That they have the perfect morphology and physiology to make such a long journey at all is a natural miracle. You and Hubert are truly lucky to find yourselves in just the right place to observe it.
> 
> Since you ask, the monastery is much the same as it has ever been. Does it not perplex you that halls of learning change so little on the outside, for all the labors we conduct within? Lest you think this unlike me—I still believe, as ever, that the search for higher knowledge naturally occasions some disregard for the minutiae of everyday life, and rightly so. I just happen to also be of the opinion that the search for higher knowledge would proceed more comfortably if someone saw to the windows in the Cardinals’ Room, which let in such terrible drafts you would imagine we were on the cusp of winter year-round.
> 
> Caspar has been needling me to visit you. He says the library won’t miss me, not when I’m so close I could conceivably reach you after a day’s ride, make it back the next day and find all the books none the worse for wear. I have told Caspar that nothing could compel me to ride that hard that was not a matter of life and death, and I’d like to believe such things are behind us now, you and I. I can see your mountains easily from here, from every window of every tower, and for now at least that is closeness enough.
> 
> I hope the books you requested reach you undamaged, along with this letter. Be well.
> 
> Yours,  
> Linhardt von Hevring

Fall comes. You meet it on the front porch, with a cup of coffee on the table in front of you and one of Linhardt’s books open beside it, showing an illustration of a horse in mid-canter. You are copying it into the sketchbook balanced on your lap, badly. The legs are too straight, the neck too thick-set, the eyes set too far forward in the face. You may as well just forget about adding wings, when the foundational shape of the body continues to elude you as much as it ever has.

The stick of charcoal in your hand is worn down to a stub now from all your sketching, your fingertips blackened with dust where you press down hardest. That you have not forgotten yourself enough to crush it into powder in your more frustrated moments is its own small miracle. You know for a fact that you are doing this badly—Hubert had called this attempt _quite striking_ when he brought out the coffee, and he is never so effusive about anything true.

Across the table from you, Hubert is writing a letter of his own. The scratching of his quill across the parchment sounds, for a moment, like pine needles underfoot. Like walking in the forest, in the shadows of branches going yellow with autumn. You already know he is transcribing the sounds of Ferdinand’s house, faithfully.

You do not ask what Hubert writes about, when he sends letters back to the capital. You do not ask whether he continues to think of Enbarr as home—if he ever did, if he has ever so much as entertained such a sentimental notion. Perhaps it’s only fair, since every day you are finding you would not have an easy answer for what, and where, home is. Already in your mind’s eye, you can feel the shape of the city blurring. The wide streets, the halls of the castle. They glimmer and shift, and turn into trees, and then into mountains, and then into rosebushes blooming out of season.

"Hubert," you murmur, returning your gaze to your poorly drawn horse. You draw a diagonal line where one wing should be, unfolding lightly upward, no more than a shadow. You draw another. "Did you know that pegasi migrate south for the winter?"

The quill pauses. He does not look up at you. For all you know, part of him may still be wandering in the words. But that’s just as well, you think. Just as well for him to have places to disappear to now and then.

"I’ve been told, Lady Edelgard, he says, that they are born ready to fly."

He says it as though he can hardly imagine such a thing. When you think about it, neither can you.

* * *

**winter**

> 27th day of the Guardian Moon, year 1191
> 
> To my dear friend Edelgard:
> 
> To tell you the truth, I think Hubert is being very silly. You will tell him that for me, will you not? One does not conquer one’s fear of heights by standing every day at a cliff’s edge and looking straight down into the chasm. He will only feed the fear this way, even if he never says anything of it aloud. You already live on the mountainside; simply being there will teach him how to live beside his fear, in time. He will not even know it is happening, and then, before he knows it, he will be ready to fly.
> 
> It was like this for me, too, for in Brigid there are no creatures that might bear humans into the sky. There are no pegasi, and no wyverns such as there are in Almyra. I had to learn at the academy how to live beside the thought of flying before I could fly. Now I find myself missing it, as though it had become a part of me. Perhaps my dear Arida runs now with Hubert’s herd, in the peaks above your house. It comforts me to imagine her so close to you, free and at home again among her own kind.
> 
> You are kind to ask how my people are faring. Do not worry about how we will pass the winter. The waves are high of late, and the wind biting, and the days darken much more swiftly, but we have our fill of the sun’s warmth even so. Enough, at least, that we can continue with what matters—with the fishing, and the farming of winter vegetables, and the hunting, which year-round can run long, long into the night. If the mornings are mild enough, I can still swim in the sea. Here, no change of season can keep me from it.
> 
> It is a dream of mine to show you my homeland one day, though I understand your fear of the ocean does not permit it for the moment. There is no shame in this either, Edelgard. We who are born and grow up by the ocean love and fear it in equal measure, because it changes in all weathers, between one day and the next. It gives life, and it takes it away, and we learn, each in our own time, to accept this as the way of things. It is a hard lesson and at times a bitter one, and we are not wrong to be gentle on ourselves about the learning where we can. We are not wrong to want our lives to continue. This is the other face of fear. You, too, are living beside it.
> 
> This is my promise to you. When this winter passes and the warm winds begin to blow again in Fódlan, I will come to you instead. Watch for me as you watch the eastern sky for the pegasus herds flying home. Until then, may you and Hubert keep each other strong as you always have, and find your way safely to the end of these longest months. In all seasons my heart is with you, for always and always.
> 
> Petra

For as long as you can remember, winter has existed to you primarily as a time composed of silences. Everything you could hear—voices, sounds of footsteps and passing carriages, horses and church bells—had come to you as though from a great distance, slow-moving and edgeless. And yet your first winter in the house feels as though you are always listening to something, as if the mountain itself seeks to prove to you that nothing is ever still, out here. There is always something to listen to, if you are the kind to pay attention.

Yesterday, you had heard foxes padding through the snow, rooting around in the undergrowth a stone’s throw from your window. Today, Hubert is in the kitchen with his sleeves rolled up to the elbows, making soup. It bubbles like a breathing thing as you sit at the kitchen table writing to Dorothea, though the words have long left you and you’ve settled for sketching roses in the margins, distracted.

"Lady Edelgard," he says, as your hand completes the crooked curve of one final petal, starts work on a vine that twists its way around the bottom of the paper, encroaching upon the edges of your signature. "Might I trouble you to bring me the bay leaf?"

It must be the first time he has ever asked anything of you. You are on your feet before you realize it, ready to give him whatever he requires.

* * *

**spring**

> Day 10, Harpstring Moon, 1192
> 
> Dear Edelgard,
> 
> I really feel you about drawing horses. Everyone I know who paints or draws says they’re an artist’s bane, like you can practice them for years and still feel like there’s something you’re getting wrong, some little detail about a muscle or a hoof that makes the whole thing look off. I definitely feel that, no matter how much I practice. As for what helps me… Looking at them, mostly. Horse bodies don’t exactly come naturally to the imagination the way other animals’ bodies do—you know how if you think about it hard enough, sheep bodies kind of look like goat bodies, and goat bodies kind of look dog bodies? Not horse bodies, though. They’re totally different. Their legs are thinner and longer than you expect, and their torsos are so big and muscular, almost too big for their legs to carry. Their heads are really strange, too. All angular and pointy. But I do like watching the ways their legs bend. How they stand, and move.
> 
> Horses are kind of bizarre, aren’t they, Edelgard? They’re so big, but so nervous. So strong, but so fragile. So many things scare them. Did you know that they won’t step in puddles because they have no way of knowing how deep they are, and they don’t want to break a leg? Do horses have to learn this, do you think, or is it something they just know from the beginning, the same way baby foals know how to stand pretty much as soon as they’re born? Ferdinand told me that—that in an hour or two they’re walking, running, following their mother wherever she goes. Isn’t that amazing?
> 
> Oh, but look at me, I’ve wasted so much ink just going on and on about horses. And in a letter to you, of all people. I never thought I’d see the day that you asked me for advice, and here I am answering with nothing helpful except that I understand a little bit about what’s giving you a hard time at the moment… But maybe that will help? I used to feel like it did, sometimes, when people said they understood me. And now I want to tell the person I used to be that I’m writing this letter to you, because she was so scared of the person you were. She’d never believe it, not in a hundred years.
> 
> I’m not scared of the person you are now, though. Not anymore. That person’s horses are as clumsy as mine, and also as wonderful.
> 
> Just keep practicing. Let me know anytime you need supplies, and I’ll get you the best stuff I can. For now, more charcoal, and some nice paintbrushes—you should have good ones when you begin trying watercolor. And now that the days are warming up again, maybe you can start sketching outside? I find I always draw better when I’m working on things I can see.
> 
> I’d love to see all your pictures, even the practice ones you say are so odd. Especially those ones, I think. If Hubert never laughs at them, neither will I.
> 
> Take care,  
> Bernadetta

You have no memory of what it was like to discover Hubert was afraid of heights. You feel you have always known it, in the same way you have always known his name, in the same way that you do not know a life that does not have him somewhere in it—at least on the edges of it, never more distant from you than the shadow you cast. You have always known him to avoid windows. You have always known him to mount and descend stairs with his head high, gaze angled resolutely upward or forward, never down.

You do remember the day it first occurred to you that he might dream of flying. You were still students together then, and the professor had placed you on sky watch with Petra. You had sent her ahead of you; from the ground you could already hear her soaring, circling the Goddess Tower astride lovely Arida. Taking to the sky like she had not had to learn how.

The season, you’ve forgotten. The name of your own borrowed mount, you’ve forgotten. But you remember Hubert holding the bridle, and his eyes were not on you, but on its face, and on its wings. As you took off, he had stood with one hand shading his eyes, gazing up at you with such relentless attention you almost mistook it for longing, for what had felt like a long time.

It’s been years, now, since you’ve flown. You decided early on that it was not for you, that you could never be comfortable unless you were bearing your own weight. That hasn’t changed.

You are out walking in the mountains with Hubert when the pegasi return. There’s a hand-carved walking stick in his hand, a fresh sketchpad in the satchel at your side. Your face is already tilted upward, glorying in the sunshine. And then you see them—an array of graceful, gold-tinged shadows, flying in formation. And then you hear their wings beating, and then you are breathing in time with it, bringing the pounding of your heart to heel.

As they pass over you, your eyes go back to earth. They go to Hubert’s face, watch him continue to watch the sky. He too looks about to take flight, any moment now, any moment now.

* * *

**summer**

> Day 8 of the Garland Moon, 1192
> 
> Dear Edie,
> 
> It’s exciting to think about whether this letter will reach you before I do. Perhaps you’ll think me silly for even sending a letter at all, when it won’t be long before I’m in speaking distance of you again, for the first time in over a year. Certainly I think I’m being silly—thinking of you does that to me, and thinking of seeing you again even more so—but the truth is there are certain rare things it serves me better to write than to say aloud. Call it a manner of performance anxiety. Call it stagefright, even. Does that amuse you? I’ve stood upon so many stages, and I’m good at saying all the words written by others, and yet I find myself so distrustful of my own that here I am, seeking refuge behind the quill to write to you.
> 
> What do I have to tell you, then, that is so important? How shall I say it? Here in Enbarr, in the palace gardens, the rosebushes are finally blooming. There are so many of them that I can smell them on the breeze from the opera house. Whenever I go up there to take tea with Ferdie and Caspar on Sundays, it feels like yet another hedge has blossomed, red and white as far as the eye can see. It never ends.
> 
> Whenever I walk in those gardens, I think of one I’ve never seen: the one you tend, in your house in the mountains. I think of you pruning the hydrangeas, and remember a girl with her hands in the dirt in the greenhouse at Garreg Mach. All the power to command armies in those hands and yet they couldn’t get a single thing to grow. Now I want to see all the things that are alive because of their hard work.
> 
> Isn’t it such a wonder, Edie, that now you’re making things bloom? And that Hubie is flying. He used to sweat just being up in the tower with you; I don’t know if you ever noticed. Wonders never cease! But then again, this is not new about the two of you: you’ve always been wondrous to me, in ways too numerous to name. Maybe you haven’t always known how to see it, but I have. I hope you get enough light in your quiet place that you can see it, too, at last.
> 
> And yet, for all that, I can’t help but be glad—terribly, selfishly glad—that you’ve invited us all to disrupt the peace, at least for a while. Bear with me again a little, won’t you? Already my heart is running ahead to meet you, and to make a nuisance of itself.
> 
> Your Dorothea

By your birthday, the climbing roses you planted on the nones of the Great Tree Moon are blooming. Under your care they have even begun to run a bit wild, winding up and over the garden wall, covering it in a curtain of dark green and white. There are so many that you feel no regret at all when you come out with a pair of shears to snip off a basketful of blooms. Later you will weave them all together, as you never had the chance to do when you were a girl and so preoccupied with things that needed accomplishing: six garlands for the dearest friends of your heart, and for Dorothea, a crown.

You know the shape that passes over you before it descends, circling slowly, wingbeats stirring your hair. Hubert’s mare is tall, bright-eyed. Her left wither is marked with an arrow scar. The way you will tell this story to the others later is that this past spring she tamed him, rather than the other way around. You will tell them he has yet to name her because he is waiting for someone with more skill at naming things to do the honors.

"I saw a carriage coming through the valley," he tells you, from above. His black cloak sits so peculiarly around him when he flies now, the ends of it fluttering, trailing—a thing of shadow, edged in sunlight. "Scarlet and gold. A quite garish thing. Impossible to miss, even from the heights."

Some things don’t change. The truth is your day is full of things that need accomplishing. There’s a stew that needs making, and eggs to gather from the coop round the back, and bread to cut into rounds. You could look over the guest rooms one last time. Already the ones you are waiting for have begun to arrive, and yet here you are with your arms full of flowers, going nowhere in a particular hurry.

"Go to meet it," you tell him, smiling, and he does.

**Author's Note:**

> Bernadetta's letter pays homage to Emma Hunsinger's ["How to Draw a Horse"](https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/how-to-draw-a-horse), which is in many ways an extremely Bernadettacore essay.
> 
> You can find me on [Twitter!](https://twitter.com/strikinglight_)


End file.
